April 5 to June 2, 2013
The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street
New York City,  (212) 219-2166

Giosetta Fioroni, Bambino solo (Lone Child), 1968, pencil, white aluminum enamel on canvas, 39 3/8 x 78 11/16 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Giuseppe Schiavinotto.

A lightbulb, a heart, a bed. The first three recognizable images in the Italian artist Giosetta Fioroni’s mini retrospective at the Drawing Center exude simplicity and lightness. Rendered in silver aluminum paint and graphite pencil, her paintings on paper are like evocative cover songs in which a new personality is encoded onto a popular tune. In contrast to Jasper Johns’ bronze Light Bulb I (1958), Jim Dine’s 1960s heart paintings or Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955), Fioroni suspends her images within expansive space, creating a context for them that feels emotional and quiet. Like much of the work on view, these paintings, made in 1959-60, have a diagrammatic quality, like theater props or designs for a larger, unseen ensemble.

The Drawing Center has become the go-to venue for re-contextualizing artists within a historical continuum of Modernism and cross-media experimentation. (Remarkable exhibitions of Frederick Kiesler, Ree Morton, Dorothea Tanning, and Unica Zürn fit this bill). L’Argento is notable for being Fioroni’s first solo exhibition in the United States, which is surprising for an artist who achieved a high level of critical attention in her native country in the 1960s. Giosetta Fioroni, born in Rome in 1932 to artist parents, was the only woman member of the Piazza del Popolo group of Roman artists that included Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, and Cesare Tacchi, artists who were, in Fioroni’s words, “interested in pictorial reality after ‘Art’ Informel.” The group was also closely aligned with the eurocentric, cerebral version of abstract expressionism practiced by Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly (a close friend of Fioroni’s), who were both highly visible in Rome in the late ‘50s. The earliest work in the show, a series of untitled drawings from her Parisian Journal (1958-62), made in “a tiny room that Tristan Tzara offered me” are a storyboard of abstract thoughts. They provide a glimpse into a young artist’s private world, her preoccupations with language, automatic writing, childhood, and theater that would provide the basis for her mature body of work.

Silver, commonly associated with Andy Warhol’s factory and the silver clouds and studio décor of high Pop, is for Fioroni a craftsman’s substance, a way to imprint memory in space.  Her three all-over silver canvases suggest a pile-up of celluloid. In Lagoon (1960) and The Secret in Action (1959-60), there is an opulence and variety to the marks; the stenciled word “LAGUNA,” appears underneath a graphite rectangle shape. Fioroni is effectively naming the painting within the painting, framing space for the art object in a similar manner to Jasper Johns’ Tennyson (1958). The paintings are nearly monochrome, but they read more as open-ended experiments than the contemporaneous blue paintings of Yves Klein. Here silver does not embody a jewel-like commodity (recently evidenced in Jacob Kassay’s highly prized silver-oxidized canvases), but signifies what Fioroni describes as a “non-color,” an emulsion layer that can absorb and reflect light.

Giosetta Fioroni, Senza titolo (Untitled), 1961, oil and enamel on canvas, 45 3/16 x 35 inches. Collection Jacorossi, Rome.

Fioroni’s paintings of archetypal ‘60s models’ faces, unsmiling and vague, framed by the semi-oval of a camera lens, dominate the show. Double Liberty and Liberty (both 1965) feature an image of the Italian actress Elsa Martinelli’s blankly staring face. The two-toned reductive image has a strong graphic quality that resembles silkscreen. The multiple borders, edges, drips and scratchy note-like pencil marks around the faces are the personalized touch that stops the work from being read as either pure idolatry or cultural critique. Less overtly dated as “Pop” painting and more purely imaginative are Lone Child (1967-68) and Self-portrait at Seven (1971-72), figures of children seen from behind and gazing into space. They carry the patina of time that the decades have bestowed on them with greater assurance than contemporaneous works; the browning edges of the cream paper and canvas come across as purposeful and true, mimicking the old photographs that the paintings themselves are presumably based on.

The conceptual and visual aspect of Fioroni’s art is further reduced in the 1970 Laguna series of silver paint and pencil drawings of the villas and vistas of Venice’s Grand Canal. In one drawing the stenciled words “San Marco” at the bottom of an empty trapezoidal shape are the only indication of the famed piazza. The potential of photography to contain all information about a given place, especially a postcard-perfect location, is inverted in this work. In conversation with the critic Alberto Boatto (in conjunction with a 1990 monograph on her work) Fioroni draws a connection between her imagery of landscapes, ruins, and solitary figures and a “sweet, rural Italy that no longer exists, replaced nowadays by a telegenic one.” Mixed in with this sentiment, however, is the spectral presence of war and politics: A painting from 1969, Obedience shows a woman giving the fascist salute, and The Mountain Tomb (1971) depicts a mountain in the Alps that was the infamous site of a battle between Italian and Austrian troops in the first world war.

Fioroni’s art is that tricky to define thing: tasteful radicalism.  Her 1960s paintings of “It girls” and lost children could as easily adorn the living rooms of Italian intellectuals as Morandi paintings did in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1963). I can see how her art’s meaning could expand through its proximity to the culture of a household, a city, or a country. Politely installed in the institutional cool of the freshly renovated Drawing Center it becomes a challenge to grasp the work’s full spectrum of content, the host of political and social implications that a contemporary Italian viewer would have picked up in Fioroni’s subject matter. What does come across is a devotion to theatre as the silver lining of all visual experience—from her early drawings of costumes, to the doll’s house sized sculpture, Home: Domestic Interior (1969), to the illustrated script for Countryside Spirits (early 1970s), a play loosely based on the village she lived in. Giosetta Fioroni’s work from the 1960s resonates today as an artifact of singular affection and ambivalence towards her country’s (and indeed the western world’s) new culture of spectatorship with its mediated relationship to personal and historical images.

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Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation
20 Jay Street, Suite 720, Brooklyn, NY, 11201
(718) 858-2244

Amy Feldman, Show & Tell, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 80 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Blackston gallery.

The Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program has been going strong since 1991. Each year 16 artists (ranging from emerging to more established) are selected for one year of free studio space in Dumbo, Brooklyn. 2013 marks the 5th anniversary of the Space Program’s relocation across the river to Brooklyn – for 17 years the studios were housed in Tribeca. This year is no exception to the eclectic mix of painters, sculptors, video, and performance artists. The artists participating in the 2012-13 Space Program are: Lisa Beck, Pam Butler, Kris Chatterson, N. Dash, Amy Feldman, Robert Green, Vit Horejs, Gilbert Hsiao, Liz Magic Laser, Beverly McIver, Sam Messer, Douglas Melini, Jennifer Nuss, Erika Ranee, Hadieh Shafie, David Simons, Didier William, and Randy Wray.

N. Dash, Amy Feldman, and Douglas Melini are three Sharpe artists working at the limits of abstraction and the painted image. All three were included in the Abrons Art Center exhibition Decenter, a contemporary valentine to the radical spirit of the 1913 Armory Show. Dash is a formal maverick who moves between mediums with precision and wit; she works with photography, homemade dyes, graphite, linen, jute, and found objects. Her spartan minimalism and mystical/scientific approach to materials is reminiscent of the early 1970s work of Dorothea Rockburne. Recent group shows include Zach Feuer, Room East, and Gallery Joe in Philadelphia, and she will participate in Painting in Place, opening May 22 at the Famers and Merchants Bank in Los Angeles.

Douglas Melini, Vanishing Violet, 2013, acrylic paint on canvas with hand painted frame, 53.5 x 45.5 x 1.754 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Feature Inc.

Feldman is also a devotee of the reduced palette – her sizable paintings are at once goofy and sturdy, like signs for an alien city glimpsed in passing on the highway. There is a rorschach test quality to her forms and muted grayscale; anything can appear if you look hard enough. Feldman’s new work will be on view with Blackston gallery at NADA NYC, May 10-12. Melini pursues a personal geometry that is both decorative and mandala-like. A self-described “hard-edge” painter, there is nonetheless a lot of soft fun to be had in his hypnotic blend of rich color and tight lines. All three, in their own language, are pursuing an approach to the two-dimensional surface that is  open-ended and very receptive to the viewer’s visual meditation.

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Amadeo Modigliani, Seated Man in a Chair, 1918.

The Nahmad family, a fixture at auction houses and New York society gatherings, are estimated by Forbes to have a total net worth of more than $3 billion. The quietly elegant exhibitions that the gallery mounted, most recently Soutine/Bacon, and Alexander Calder: the Painter, evoke tasteful privilege and old-world money, but nevertheless also communicate an underlying fixation on the art object as supreme luxury investment. The current crisis is not their first brush with the law. Earlier this year it was reported that the family was being sued for the return of a Modigliani painting, Seated Man on a Chair (1918) that had been reportedly stolen by the Nazis from its original owner. The Nahmads’ found a legal loophole to keep possession of the painting by claiming that the work was in fact owned by the International Art Center—a company that the painting’s original owners claim is an off-shore holding site for the Nahmads’ vast collection.

Reached in London, David Nahmad expressed surprise and disbelief over the current claims leveled against his son’s gallery, calling the FBI’s allegation of a close-knit relationship between his family business and the Russian mob “totally stupid.” The federal investigation of the Nahmad Gallery is ongoing, and is an important link in a sweeping, $100+ million money-laundering case against gambling dens. Other arrests include a cadre of colorfully named characters: Molly (“Poker Princess”) Bloom; Joseph (“Joe the Hammer”) Mancuso; Stan (“Slava”) Greenberg; and Noah (“The Oracle”) Siegel. On Friday, April 19 thirty-odd individuals, including Helly Nahmad, were arraigned in a Manhattan court. All suspects took the same plea: “not guilty.”

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May 3 to June 30, 2012
555 West 24 Street
New York City, 212-741-1111

Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1959. Waterpaint and oil on canvas, 49-1/4 x 65 inches. © Courtesy of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana and Gagosian Gallery. Private Collection, Milan.

You enter a labyrinth, white walls and floors, ceilings not too high and shrouded in a material that softens the overhead gallery lights. Smiles or averted eyes exchanged with the people in front and behind you, a playful gravitas, shared with others. What is striking about Lucio Fontana’s last Ambiente Spaziale (Spatial Environment) made in 1968, is the intimacy of its scale, and the sensation of being both inside and outside a work of art. Inside the innermost corridor is a cut-out opening in the wall, outlined in black. Like the televised vision of the Madonna from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita its appearance comes as a revelation for believers and non-believers alike, image and event rolled into one.

Fontana has the questionable fortune of being instantly recognized by and reduced to his signature gesture—a careful and quick incision, either a slice or a hole, into a canvas. This mark, or rather the absence of the mark, has absorbed extraneous social and political content with each new wave of criticism. A New York Times critic writing in the late 1980s labeled the distinctive cuts “misogynist” and noted the “intermittent violence” of the gesture. Today it is perhaps clearer that there can be no reconciliation of the sacred and profane in Fontana’s art, only an appreciation for how he fitted one inside the other. Gagosian’s sweeping retrospective, Lucio Fontana: Ambienti Spaziali, allows us to see each phase of his practice as part of a greater cosmology that extends beyond the frame of art’s edge, in order to reaffirm the limits and immanent presence of painting.

An Italian by birth, Fontana lived and worked in Buenos Aires, Paris and Milan, and like many European and South American artists of the mid-20th century, such as Jesús Rafael Soto and Yves Klein, sought to socialize a new public to abstract art through phenomenological means. Beginning in the 1930s he was a key player in many trans-European avant-gardes, such as Abstraction-Création, a collective of artists who upheld the values of abstraction in the face of Surrealism’s turn toward figuration. In 1946 Fontana contributed to the Manifiesto blanco (White Manifesto) and developed his concept of Spazialismo (Spatialism), the desire to access a fourth-dimension in art through systematically transgressing traditional painting boundaries.

Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio, 1963. Oil on canvas, 70-1/8 x 48-3/8 inches. © Fondazione Lucio Fontana. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Private Collection. Photography by Robert McKeever

The exhibition opens with a selection of the first paintings made in accordance with the theory of Spazialismo, the Concetti spaziali (Spatial Concepts), from between 1949 and the late 1950s. Fontana’s previous training as a ceramicist and sculptor comes through in his insistence on painting’s materiality. Already there is a discernible order to the Buchi (Holes) series—a technique clearly derived not from passion, but from a force of mind. The punctures in the surface are delicate, like traces in sand, and are never expressionistic. The colors slip between natural and industrial: indigo, silver/cement grey, cadmium yellow, bright blue and pea green. In the Pietre (Stones) series, bright pieces of Murano glass are stuck on the surface like jewels to create a three-dimensional pileup. The paintings exist at the very edge of the pictorial, suggesting planets, stars and animal bodies. The radical conceit of a painting made from collaged surface elements has one of its precedents in Joan Miró’s late 1920s paintings on unprimed canvases; Painting (Cloud and Birds) and 48 (both 1927) contain scriptural numbers, real feathers, and brushy areas of pure painted color. Fontana’s paintings take flight from where Miró’s leave off, banishing any trace of language or pictographic organization.

Four of the artist’s rarely exhibited walk-in environments serve as a kind of black box annex to the main attraction of the paintings. In Ambienti spaziali a luce nero (Spatial Environment in Black Light) (1949) the only light source in the room comes from a black light reflecting off Day-Glo-painted, papier maché objects suspended from the ceiling. Florescent paint had only recently been invented in 1934, and its previous uses included amateur magic shows and color-coding allied bomber planes during World War II. Despite their theatrical, fun quality, the Ambienti spaziali do not capitulate to entertainment value. Instead, they ask for a sustained engagement that is almost educational, resembling not so much an art installation, but an old-fashioned planetarium display. Pat Steir moved into similar territory with her installation, The Nearly Endless Line (2010) at Sue Scott Gallery, a darkened room with a blue light illuminating a white line painted directly on the gallery wall. But while Steir in effect made a walk-in painting out of the gallery space, Fontana’s environments convey a sensation of space that exists wholly apart from painting as a medium.

The Attese (Waiting) series, begun in 1958, radiate action and stillness. The paintings are hung in color-coordinated groups: bright red next to charcoal grey; purple, light grey and canary yellow; forest green next to black.  The white expanse of the gallery setting and the complimentary hanging strategy suggests a strangely domesticated object, a painting that could easily adorn the walls of a high modernist waiting room or office. The surface is pure appearance, all traces of traditional paint application are gone, and the only visible gesture is a collection of surgical slices in the canvas’s center.  Fontana’s movement towards a more clearly defined object-hood in painting, and more outrageous choices in terms of color and puncture-type, reaches a climax in the series La fine di dio (End of God) (1963-64). The painting’s oval shape and sharp colors (neon lime, bubblegum pink) read as high-end kitsch, a kind of Madison Avenue window display that speaks to the rising decadence of culture in the 1960s. The irresistible, smooth surface is riddled with holes, almost as if the historical body of “painting” itself was under siege. If, as Willem de Kooning put it, “flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented,” then the gold-framed mirrors that are Fontana’s La fine di dio paintings reflect the unspeakable thing that we have become. The buried content of the work gives evidence to Theodor Adorno’s observation that true art is a form of “weeping without tears.”

In Trinità (Trinity) (1966), an installation of three paintings, placed for the first time here following Fontana’s original plan, the connection to the sacred is again made explicit by the work’s title. Three white monochrome Buchi paintings set inside cream-colored, lacquered wood frames are placed next to and above three half spheres made of brilliant, cobalt blue plastic. There is a softness to the elements not found in Fontana’s previous work, in the two qualities of white, and one blue as unchanging as the ocean and the sky, for instance.  A grid of delicate holes in the side canvases and a spiral in the center are the only traces of the artist’s hand. A majestic presence is achieved by the paintings being installed slightly higher off the floor than usual, so one’s gaze has to travel upwards. The work suggests an ideal of the infinite with the most minimal means possible, and has a similar commitment to joy through sustained looking as an Agnes Martin painting from the same era.

The last paintings Fontana made are the Teatrini (Little Theatres) (1965-66), miniature worlds-unto-themselves that, like the Trinità group, are monochrome canvases punctured with a series of small holes, set inside colorful, lacquered, wood frames. The cut edge of each frame loosely suggests natural forms (like a Jean Arp wood relief) and creates a delicate shadow-play effect against the canvas. In dialogue with the Bucchi paintings from the 1940s, the Teatrini flirt with the pictorial, the relationship between the frame and the surface yielding a number of dualities: trees/buildings, night/day, man/woman, clouds/earth. At the end of his life, Fontana had achieved a kind of painting that was infused with myth, but remained as simple and straightforward as its material properties. Abstract painting’s primal relationship to the theatrical is laid bare in this work, as the silhouette of the edge meets the mute code of the perforated surface.

For copyright reasons we are presently unable to post images of the environments reconstructed at Gagosian Gallery discussed in this article.  For Ambiente Spaziale (Spatial Environment) (1968) and Ambienti spaziali a luce nero (Spatial Environment in Black Light) (1949) please visit http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/lucio-fontana–may-03-2012/exhibition-images images 36 to 37 and 38 to 40 respectively. 

January 29 to March 9, 2009
1 Freeman Alley, off Rivington Street, Lower East Side
New York City, 212 529 7400

Francesca DiMatteo, Blackout 2008. Same medium and dimensions. cover MARCH 2009: Head and Mask 1 2009. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 15 inches. Courtesy Salon 94

Francesca DiMattio’s solo exhibit of paintings on view at Salon 94 and Salon 94 Freemans is a double bird strike for the young New York painter. Both uptown and downtown gallery spaces are exhibiting a selection of paintings from 2008 to 2009 that communicate the physical drama of momentous chaos and miraculous recovery.

This is DiMattio’s second solo show at Salon 94.  The paintings are a confluence of geometric spaces, loose and fast brushwork, and recognizable figurative elements (ladders, lace, showers, chairs) soldered together as teetering structures within stark black, white and grey tiled spaces. The mythical storytelling of German Expressionism and the playful heaviness of 1980’s Neo-Expressionism are visible forbearers for DiMattio’s paintings. There is also a direct connection to Francis Bacon in her depiction of human and inanimate forms in motion against a stage-like space. Bacon’s acute sense of ecstasy and tragedy are also a little on display as well, but to less extreme effect. Instead, it is a dreamy, personally-conceived Surrealism that is most at play here.  Unlike other young painters who combine abstraction and figuration in explosion-like arrangements, DiMattio forgoes obvious reference to our age of accelerating communication and technology. This is partly due to the painting craft being a visible component. Thickly rendered wedges and lines of paint take on sculptural qualities, literally becoming the glue and grout that holds the tile surface together and keeps the ladder from collapsing.

Blackout (2008) and Whiteout (2008) are complimentary paintings, on view respectively at Salon 94 Freemans and Salon 94.  Amid a room of maximal energy and violent action, both paintings offer an oasis of relatively minimal calm. In Blackout an angular space is created with fields of black and grey, two buttressing tree trunks, and a lemon yellow umbrella-like form floating above. The central focus rests on a thin white lawn chair, a moment of light carved into the darkness of the “blackout.”  The black is thickened by a density of lines and patterns that hint at a rigorous history behind the arrived at composition. Whiteout has the same central motif of a furniture object floated in a thick space of all-over white.  Labor and time is a felt presence in the painting, a pulsing energy that radiates off DiMattio’s most successful compositions.

On view at Salon 94, Figure 2 (2008) describes an illusionist space with loosely drawn tiles as the sides, floor and back wall. The action in the middle is a pile-up that stretches from floor to ceiling.  The central characters are a Greek column, lacquered wood chair, table, and ladder. In the receding background is the silhouette of an old-fashioned sailing vessel and a water tower. Entangled in the middle of the rubble is a human figure, a burst of flesh tone amid the popping graphics and splashing debris. A black chair stationed at the lower right corner of the canvas appears as an invitation to have a seat on stage to watch the action. In this sealed vision we are allowed to breathe through the freshness of paint itself, an ingredient that is always visible as pure material.

Francesca DiMatteo, Head and Mask 1 2009. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 15 inches. Courtesy Salon 94

In all of DiMattio’s paintings there is slippage between interior and exterior space, a preoccupation that can be traced through the history of modern painting.  In a way that is similar to Matisse’s The Piano Lesson (1916) where figures, furniture and statues are spatially transformed into fragments, there is a spell cast on the quotidian in DiMattio that endows every object with newfound meaning. However closely she references classical,  renaissance and modernist genres, her paintings never lapse into nostalgia, but instead give off an arch contemporary emotion. The use of pitch black, white and grid tiles has the effect of a printed graphic against a sharp color palette of reds and pinks.

The quiet showstoppers are to be found uptown where three large-scale canvases are complimented by four small paintings of classical Greek statue heads with colorful face paint “masks.” The metaphysical melancholy of de Chirico is channeled through DiMattio’s heads, yet her painterly touch is more pronounced. The mask-like visages of Bay area painter David Park come to mind, as does Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon.  Head and Mask 3 (2009) packs the greatest visual impact of the group—candy-colored, irregular shapes, applied with palette knife perfection to an expressionless face from antiquity. There is nothing ironic in the gesture. Like the epic paintings, the heads are a self-contained vision unto themselves, simply conceived and endowed with the emotional weight of an artifact from a lost culture.

Baker Overstreet, Sequined Cyclone Sequence 2008, Acrylic and latex on canvas: 48 by 62 inches. Images courtesy of Fredericks & Freiser, New York

Follies, the title of Baker Overstreet’s solo painting exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser, exists somewhere between theatrical put-on and shoe gazing self-awareness.  In architecture a “folly” is an ornamental, often eccentrically designed building. An example in New York City would be Central Park’s Belvedere Castle, a fairy tale landmark of eternal childhood. “Follies” is also the name of Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 musical, itself a reference to early 20th century vaudeville revues. The thirteen paintings on view (all made in 2008) share in the multifaceted whimsy of the exhibition’s title.  Painted in glossy, starburst hues of acrylic and latex, the first distinguishing characteristic of the set is a common black or dark grey background.  This technique calls to mind the high kitsch of black velvet painting as well as the glowing, black light posters, which adorned many teenage bedrooms in the 1970s.  The dark backdrop becomes a stage set for the real “action” of the paintings—an order of tight and flashy geometric designs.

The paintings lend themselves to the idea of a multi-tiered structure, part disco dance floor and part spaceship.  The abstractions can be read as dimensional objects, with a bottom and top orientation, or as a flat pattern plane.  Sequined Cyclone Sequence appears as a requiem for the old time religion of Coney Island. Combining a psychedelic maximal impulse with the restraint of a carefully painted bodega sign advertising ice cream cones, the painting throws itself into a readable architecture of forms and signs. The Continental Bathosphere, resemble a Masonic Temple with Jetsons-era columns framing a gilded series of orbs and hints of rainbows. An unabashed decorative energy is readily visible in all of the paintings. Circles and squares are outlined or dotted with smaller circles, sometimes collapsing the painting into itself, and other times gathering the wild abstraction in by the reins to resemble a coherent form.

All of the paintings radiate a smooth ease of formal decisions. Hints of past layers visible beneath the surface are the only counterpunch to a solid machine that affords little room for speculation beyond its shiny and seductive design. The label of “primitive” given to Overstreet and many of his peers in contemporary abstract painting belies a highly stylized, self-conscious approach to image construction. The perfect power chord is struck between the loose design of a sign painter and the drive towards layered spectacle.  From cool to warm, neon to primary, the color combinations seem intangibly homemade and magical. In each painting’s spectrum, there is a boldness and density that bears similarity to artists such as Alfred Jensen and Tal R.

Many of the paintings’ titles convey arche nostalgia for glamour, decadence and the iconic visuals of pinball machines. Alibaster Plaster Caster, Sizzle ’76, Ball in the Jack andTechnicolor Chromolume all resonate as personal references to the lingo of 1960s and ‘70s culture. The paintings’ high voltage energy mixed with an implacable, hand-drawn symmetry results in a vaguely sinister authority. The line “fearful symmetry,” from William Blake’s poem “The Tyger,” kept repeating in my head as I walked from painting to painting. The pop of hot colors and ruler straight lines against the blackness commands an inanimate dominance of space.  Mandala shapes and the repetition of forms lend the paintings the severity of totemic worship.  Jewel-like and complete unto itself, it is form of worship that doesn’t extend past the painting’s flat surface.

11 West 53rd Street
between 5th and 6th avenues
New York City

Dorothea Rockburne, Untitled from Locus 1972. One from a series of six relief etching and aquatints on folded paper, composition and sheet (approx., unfolded), 39-3/4 x 30-1/16 inches. Museum of Modern Art, Given in memory of Beth Lisa Feldman © 2008 Dorothea Rockburne / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (red butterfly) 2002, colored pencil on paper, 24 x 19 inches Museum of Modern Art, The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift

Curator Starr Figura uncovers the relationship of geometry to two-dimensional abstraction from 1912 to today without imposing a narrative arc. The attention rests first on individual works of art, however the exhibition is teeming with a myriad of connections between disciplines, formal imagery, and the relationship between spiritual content and conceptual design. Many of the artists represented are equally recognized as teachers (most notably Josef Albers), authors of manifestos, and members of schools or collectives, and an intense doctrinaire commitment to the geometric-based practice runs through many of “Geo/Metric.”Modestly inhabiting the Museum of Modern Art’s newest gallery space on the second floor, “Geo/Metric,” is the kind of user-friendly, yet classically rigorous exhibition that can be taken for granted in the age of curatorial spectacles.  This is unfortunate, since exhibits like “Geo/Metric,” and the recently closed “Multiplex: New Directions in Art Since 1970,” are crucial in bringing MoMA’s naturally inclined historicism into a mutually beneficial relationship with its growing collection of contemporary art.

In the “Suprematist Manifesto” (1915), created the same year as “Black Square,” Kazimir Malevich describes geometric forms as symbols of both a primeval mysticism, and a highly rigorous, intellectual parlay between the artist’s subjectivity and the impassive art object.  For each succeeding generation, this interplay of geometric form and content is located at different points. Malevich and Kandinsky, arguably the first practitioners and theorists of a non-objective art of geometric forms and symbols, are presented alongside lesser-exhibited compatriots, Frantisek Kupka, Vasilii Kamenskii, and Lyubov Popova.

Learning at the table of the Russian Constructivists, Helio Oiticia’s five luminous gouache on board works, radiate a fresh Neo-Constructivism. Created when Oiticia was in his early 20s, and a member of Rio de Janeiro’s concrete art collective, Grupo Frente, the “Metaesquemas” (1957) series are simple, cut-out geometric forms in red, white and black, composed within the limits of a grid or rectangle form on a neutral ground. The total effect captures the timing of a free jazz drumbeat, a minimalist re-interpretation of the rhythmic linoleum prints of Lyubov Popova and the paper collages Hans Arp.

Mary Heilmann’s “Davis Sliding Square” (1978), provides relief from the black and white reductive optical build-up of Bridget Riley and Francois Morellet. The painting is synthetic polymer paint on paper, a Malevich on acid description of a blue square and rectangle against a yellow backdrop. Similar to Blinky Palermo’s bright green triangle on white paper (from the screenprint series “4 Prototypes,” 1970) the geometric forms have a presence that is both organic and chemical.  Classical geometry, in the hands of Heilmann and Palermo, are indeterminate substances, peeled and placed like stickers on a flat plane. In this company Ellsworth Kelly’s  “Line Form Color” (1951), a series of ink and gouache building block color forms radiates a graphically controlled precision.

The fluid concept of “radical art,” how it was defined in its own era and is understood today, also permeates the rooms of “Geo/Metric.”  A case in point is Jo Baer’s two 1965 gouache on paper compositions—thin, deftly painted frames that illuminate the paper’s white center. Baer’s work can be overlooked in a room of the decade’s flashier offerings, but it offers some of the first investigations into the conceptual perimeters of painting and painted abstraction.  Like many artists who realize a mature vision early in their chosen art practice, Baer came to art-making from a multidisciplinary background of science and philosophy, which she brought to bear on her own development as a painter.  Her frame compositions connect the hand-made line to the impersonal and industrial forms of Minimalism. Like Agnes Martin’s grids, the form realized is at once contemporary and primitive, derived from repetitive processes that reveal a wide species of spaces.

The geometric graphic’s counterpart, the ghostly space of the paper, is investigated through radical printing practices by Dorothea Rockburne. Her “Locus” print series (1972) is comprised of paper sheets bearing lines and ridges preserved from the process of folding prior to being run through an etching press.  The slight three-dimensionality of the paper (which hangs unframed at MoMA) is geometry come to life off the page. The “Locus” prints have the sublime singularity of a child’s crumpled napkin, lending themselves to the illusion of self-created works of art.  Inseparable from the invisible mechanics of the formal process, there is an important metaphysical dimension to the work.  Describing her experience working with paper in the 1970s, Rockburne alludes to the spiritual properties underlining a highly analytic practice.  “Paper began to assume terrific importance to me. I locked myself in my studio and just stared at sheets of paper. I thought that the paper would tell me something – something that I needed to know. Finally, I felt as though I became the paper.”

“Geo/Metric” brings the conversation up to date with only passing reference to the sweeping effects of digital media on geometric abstraction, a direction that, admittedly, could be better explored in a smaller survey of artists.  Instead the exhibition satisfyingly closes its narrative with an artist, Mark Grotjahn (b. 1968), whose drawings seem to embody in equal parts the early lessons of the Russian and Brazilian Constructivists, the hard edges of Minimalism, and the flash bulb presence of Op and Pop Art. The pencil on paper “Butterfly” series are tightly realized compositions of radiating color bands meeting at horizontal perspective planes.  The awkward precision of Grotjahn’s forms and the impossibility of the spaces they describe project the jubilant urgency of a hand-painted carnival sign. After being run through the pressure chamber of Conceptual Art, geometric forms for many artists working today are not indicative of a strict allegiance to any kind of school of non-objective thought or practice. From the storied history laid out in the rooms of “Geo/Metric” it seems that geometry in art has indeed reached its highest accomplishment: the freedom of eternal fresh starts.

June 20th – July 27th, 2008

Mike Nemire, Frequency 2008 oil on Canvas, 11 x 18 inches

Visiting Mike Nemire’s painting exhibition at Janet Kurnatowski’s salon-like gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in the dead heat of summer does not provide conventional respite from the weather.  Instead of cooling your mind and body, the seven paintings radiate endless refreshment for your eye’s retina—from the familiar shores of red, yellow and blue, into the hairier neon reaches of a full color palette.

For such a “light” genre of abstract painting Op Art carries a wide range of cultural and social ramifications.  From its kitsch value as the 1960s bedfellow of groovy fashion and design, to its inclusive democracy as an art form that can be easily “taken in” by anyone with eyes. Nemire’s paintings seem detached from this history, partly due to the artist’s employment of computer programs like Photoshop to find bizarre color spectrums and combinations. The coolness of this gesture is countered by a tight handling of the painted surface, and the complexity of optical patterns is nicely squared-off by wide canvas sides.

Each painting is a formal variation, in dimension and color, on grid systems. “RGB” (24” x 24”) is the most successful painting in the group in terms of creating space and movement from a dim center towards the brighter colors of the sides.  Bands of luminous, red, green and blue are represented on a full spectrum from their glowing, saturated zenith, to a dim commonality of murky hues.  The dim to bright contrast of the color weaves lends added weight to the painting’s uniform tonal center.  The effect is one of turning a dial to a neutral hum on a loud stereo system.

Exactly how modern (or ancient) is this color-grid patterning? Is it a pixilated movement of squares covering a virtual space into infinity—or a cloth weave pattern as timeless and mundane as plaid. With titles ranging from “Frequency” to “Harlequin,” we are expected to find affirmation in both answers. “Harlequin” (16”x17”), is an almost square canvas with carnival color combinations neatly subdivided by white strips.   A boxed group of red, purple and blue, morphs by gradient degrees into an equally electric group of green, turquoise and yellow. The brightness and compact size of “Frequency” (11”x18”) gives off a concentrated sense of real heat.  The painting pulses in waves of color: hot orange becomes cool lavender, cadmium red bleeds into toxic green. In “Zeros and Ones” the notes of individual color are so miniscule that the effect is like the static fuzz glimmering off a television screen. These are paintings that should be viewed from all angles, like a hologram the image will easily slide from a straightforward surface plane to an optical illusion.

The material adherence to oil on canvas and the use of tape to grid colors, keeps the paintings within a lineage of hard-edged, perceptually minded abstraction. Mondrian, Victor Vasarely, and Alfred Jensen come to mind as fellow painter-scientists who practiced within a personal system of colors to investigate mathematical, mystical and optical space in art. Nemire doesn’t rely on computer color programs to pump symbolic or narrative blood into his work, but instead employs them as one more prop in the performance of painting. It is a testament to the wide range of color and pattern that the paintings are able to reference both the noisy funk of 1970s and ‘80s analog technology, as well as the hyper slickness of contemporary digital image-making.

Nemire’s paintings carry the same obscure emotional charge as video color test bands, glowing stripes of pure color that signal a pause before the start of the video’s narrative.  The paintings are all variations on that “before” moment, endowing it with resonance as the primary subject. It remains to be seen to what end this young artist will continue to align his tremendous painting skills with the joyful endgame of color perception. For the time being, however, it is a satisfyingly balanced union.

June 20 to July 27, 2008

Michael DeLucia, Gate (detail) 2008 concrete and chain link fence, 96 x 48 inches Courtesy Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery’s storefront entrance on Williamsburg’s Union Avenue bears minimal signs of a commercial gallery space, seamlessly blending in with the neighborhood’s perpetual state of transformation. As such it is an appropriate setting to view the work of five artists who each in their own manner transform the “non-art” materials of urban refuse and raw construction to create restrained and complex abstractions.

Michael DeLucia’s “Gate,” a cement encrusted section of a chain-link fence stands as a kind of portal into the inter-related world of each object in the one-room gallery. It’s a vision that is both childlike and slightly menacing in its re-imagining of an ordinary street object. “Gate” is a strangely impassive yet tense object, able to carry on a conversation with the gallery’s nearby free-standing radiator, as well as the totality of the space. Looking like a cross between a sublime construction site accident and Antonio Gaudi’s drippy sandcastle architecture, “Gate” is an ideal entry point to understanding the spirit of transforming the quotidian that permeates each artwork.

Elisa Lendvay’s sculptures, “Pass” and “Three,” created from charred wood and papier mache, are placed on pedestals in the manner of a primitive shrine or devotional offering. The ageless materials could be scraps recycled yesterday and picked up on a street corner, or have existed for centuries buried in caves. The patterned rust of the tin ceiling is reflected in the mirrors that each piece sits on. An orange band painted around one of the wood pieces in “Pass” recalls nautical colors, a fragment from a buoy, or the remnants of driftwood grouped together to start a fire.

Elisa Lendvay, Three 2008 charred wood, papier mache, 11 x 14 x 11 inches Courtesy Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

The flash of orange paint, the mark of the artist’s hand on seemingly scrappy material, also appears in Jim Lee’s painting “untitled (History and Belief).”  The painting is a slightly irregular grey shield-shape, supported by simple plywood pieces, constructed to be the painting surface’s visible sides. Lee’s other painting in the show, “Untitled (Shaft),” rests against the gallery wall like a stray ski, maroon and black diagonals give it a flag-like presence. A delicate framework of balsa wood supports the canvas surface, calling to mind the basement ingenuity of model airplane construction.

The tension between painted minimalism and a comparatively rough fabricated support is a personal signature of Lee’s. The resulting Malevich meets Home Depot aesthetic is reminiscent of the experimentation in the1960s and 70s towards a new poetics of painting supports and structures. Artists such as Ron Gorchov, who left the rectangle of the painting frame behind to work on a curved, sculptural stretcher, an intimation of the infinity of Space beyond the painted surface.  Don Voisine, a New York painter whom Lee is currently in a group show with at the Thomas Robertello Gallery in Chicgao, paints hard-edged abstractions of color planes, X’s and diagonals on feather-thin, industrial pink and yellow Styrofoam. The illusion of indestructibility and determined eternity of the painted abstraction is given a fresh mortality by the exposed material of its edges. Lee’s wooden supports have a similar function to Voisine’s Styrofoam, disseminating the tension away from the two-toned solid grey sublime to the handmade craft that supports it.

Joy Curtis’s sculpture, “Eight,” in dialogue with Lendvay’s “Pass” and “Three,” looks like a fragment of colorful wreckage from a ship or flooded house.  The piece, standing 5’ 5” tall, was created from household molding cut and glued together.  The mottled rainbow colors against the white wood surface appear as the natural result of sanding the painted surface. Like a rainbow of oil in a puddle after a rainstorm the effect is one of elemental magic.

Inhabiting the gallery’s back wall and baseboard is Keiko Narahashi’s installation, “assembler,” a grouping of small boxy shapes of varying sizes, painted in bright white with red and black accents. The forms range in character from candy-like pills to geometric constructivism, effectively recalling both the building blocks of childhood, and the deeply learned lessons of painting all at once.  Like “Eight,” and “Gate,” the objects of “assembler” were created from a repetitive process of material transformation. In this case paper boxes coated in layers of paint to achieve their own individual architecture.

The overriding mood in the gallery is inexplicably hopeful, perhaps a subliminal effect of the Buckminster Fuller term, “Tensegrity,” given to the exhibition. Fuller’s theory of tensegrity, the harmonious synergy and tension of parts within an integral structure, was later adopted by Carlos Castaneda to define ancient physical and mental exercises (“magical passes”) practiced by Mexican Shamans. By doing so he effectively translates a construction-based theory of energy onto the human scale, as the bodily energy that passes fluidly from waking to dreaming consciousness. In narrative form this is perhaps best defined by Borges’ magician of “The Circular Ruins,” who at the moment of his death finds that he is not a mortal, but rather merely the dream of another.  Witness to the ever-shifting zone between found object and art object, construction and luminosity, visitors to Klaus von Nichtssagend’s “Tensegrity” are given the privilege of the dreamer forever awakening to new perceptual realities.